Allegretto is very modern, a work impossible prior to this present time and understanding. The realization required computers, the internet (past and present) and the creative commons collaboration involving both. It is familiar yet modern, but unlike any prior symphonic piece; unlike many works in the modern avantegarde, it does not break with the past or emulate it, but instead exploits our prior experience of it to give us a new experience of insight into ourselves; deeply aural (in the same sense Duchamp called his films 'retinal') and for it's 50 minute run, it is a brisk walk through a wild meadow of the cognitive reality of our experience of music.

"One can look at seeing. Can one hear hearing?" (marcel duchamp)

This work is simultaneously familiar and alien. This is not the illustration of great conceptual philosophy, it is the plain and ordinary music from the inside of your head as it really is; we ring a clapper, the bell resonates, such is the nature of the form and metal of the bell. This music is roughly hewn because it is tentative and explorative -- if I could polish to final forms, my work would be done, we would have our answer, and art would cease to be any fun. Superficially indeterminant, the work pays homage to the past, leveraging precise processes by which our minds and brains perceive and interact with music, and mindful of the critical social and cognitive roles arranged sounds play in our histories. Where classical aleatoric (chance) music emulates natural soundscapes through extra-human processes, I hold 'music' as an anthropological phenomenon and embrace the pattern language of the traditional forms as rooted in the organism that creates it, and I use my audiologist's apparatus to illuminate where these roots take hold. Meter and and rhythm, for example, are not abstract mathematics, but bound intimately to the simple harmonic possibilites of the human form, the frame of the body, the structure of the lips and throat, hence the inescapable association of composition with dance and voice.

we can assert, demand and affirm all we wish, but we cannot escape who we are, not for long.

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